Shelf under Could Be Coincidence, Could Be Something Else: Vice News has a fascinating in-depth look at Roblox's attempt to launch in China, including plans to accommodate the Chinese government's expectations around censoring content that suggests, for instance, that Taiwan is independent from China. Last December, however, Roblox abandoned China for mysterious reasons:
[I]n July 2021, Roblox launched LuoBuLeSi, the Chinese version of its platform. Other documents show some of the mechanisms it had in place for complying with Chinese regulations, including a game “whitelist” and moderation features for display names in the country.
Roblox’s time in China was exceptionally short lived. In December 2021, the company closed down LuoBuLeSi without going into detail about why. Soon after it shut down, the company said that it was working to relaunch after making “necessary investments” to its “data architecture” but did not provide any additional information about closing.
The Chinese market for online games is extremely large (as I saw first-hand a decade ago), so it's strange that Roblox would give up on it so quickly.
As it happens, exactly a month before that (November 2021), a notorious Roblox user and popular YouTuber did pull this pretty cyberpunk stunt off:
"Getting over the Firewall from the US is easy because most Chinese websites don't refuse connection to American IPs," as Ruben explains to me now. "It's mostly the other way around where Chinese ISPs refuse to connect their own customers to American servers."
It took Ruben awhile to find English-speaking Chinese players willing to talk with him:
"I had been using Luobu for a few weeks before I found [name redacted for obvious reasons], who was the first person I ever saw speaking English," says Ruben. "I'm pretty sure he just used a standard VPN to encrypt his internet traffic so his ISP couldn't identify what he was connecting to... [He] never said anything that could be deemed subversive or contrary to the interests of the state, so I'm not worried about him being contacted by police or anything like that."
More here. Again this could completely be a coincidence, but it's a notable one. If this did factor into Roblox's decision, my guess is that it was just one (of possibly many examples) of what the company needed to do in order shore up its “data architecture” .
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